


Eternal Return

by ecotone



Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Vault of Glass, and all the time nonsense that comes with it, the violence isn't that violent but i'm playing it safe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-31
Updated: 2017-05-31
Packaged: 2018-11-07 09:42:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11056341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecotone/pseuds/ecotone
Summary: Sometimes, he cannot distinguish linear time from the loops of the Vault.All paths end the same way.





	Eternal Return

He is alive. 

The Hunter Pahanin escaped the Vault of Glass, outwitted the Vex and their all-knowing minds and their infinite knowledge. He made his own fate, or at least he hopes he did. If the Vex let him and him alone escape he may go mad with the knowledge. 

The Titans think he is mad already, probably. Some of the Warlocks, too- the newly-risen ones, mostly, the ones that have not seen friends kill themselves chasing Ahamkara lore, chasing dreams like the Hellmouth, the Vault- 

That’s the thing, though: no one understands what happened at the Vault. He came back alone, his ship covered in angry marks left by line rifles, by torch cannons, his hood stained by radiolaria, unable to look at the Sun without hearing the chimes of oracles. 

Pahanin came back and he told the Vanguard and they hardly knew who Kabr was, didn’t know Praedyth at all- he could barely remember Praedyth, now, with the Vault door shut- didn’t remember authorizing a team to enter the Vault in the first place. 

“To the Vex, time is fluid,” Rey tells him- Rey? Osiris was the Vanguard when he left; he thinks he can remember Kabr approaching him with the idea of opening the Vault, _Osiris told me this._ “What happened in the Vault altered time outside of it, around it.” 

What she meant, Pahanin knows: _you are the last. Your teammates are lost, and you are the only one that can remember them._

So, he tells others. About himself, some, but about a resolute Titan and the faint edges of a Warlock he can still hear, maybe, if he’s looking into a mirror just right- 

He tells others, and he tells himself, over and over so he doesn’t forget, can’t forget. He stows away in his room, some days, constructing a gun and talking to it as he builds, muttering and telling it stories about the Vault, meeting Kabr, Praedyth, the jokes Wei told him. Wei, too, gone- Mare Imbrium claimed her Light, definitive death in a way the Vault wasn’t. Which one is worse? 

He finishes the gun in a year and two days. The hard outline of time is still uncomfortable; seconds here remain seconds, time does not loop and twist and become flux. He cannot remember how he dealt with this, before. He cannot remember a great many things, save the things he has told himself so many times he accepts them as fact. His name is Pahanin, he knows. He went into the Vault and something him-shaped returned. 

He names his gun Super Good Advice; it appreciates the compliment. Pahanin appreciates a response to his chatter. He talks and writes his thoughts down and time passes by and by and by. He still feels the causal loops and alternate timelines, he thinks. He sometimes cannot separate yesterday from last week from a century ago, what was real and what was some endless Vex simulation. In life, he has his gun. In the simulations, his teammates are still with him. Occasionally he will pretend the dreams are reality, if only so he can see the hard lines of Kabr’s armor again, the warm light of Praedyth’s bond against the metal-stone walls. 

Time passes and passes and living in the shadow of the Vault never gets easier, but it becomes more bearable. The Errata becomes an odd cult classic within a few decades; Hunters understand what he’s saying, mostly, though the Titans still dismiss him as mad and the Warlocks think him flashy, dramatic, an idiot with nothing meaningful to say, no useful information recovered from the Vault. He replaces his cloak and burns the old one, radiolaria evaporating off the flaming cloth in a white-blue cloud. He cannot go to Venus, afraid he will be erased from the timeline the instant the Vex remember him, remember that he escaped. 

His gun protects him, kills in the wild, in the Crucible, in the dead of night when Pahanin thinks he sees brassy metal out of the corner of his vision, the white of a construct, the red of a goblin’s eye. His Ghost hovers near, always, ready but quiet in a way the gun never is. 

The first time he dies he comes back gasping, slashes through his own gauntlet to watch the red seep through. The Titan he’s with- _Wei,_ he wants to say, _Kabr_ \- puts a bullet through his head out of mercy. When he wakes again, his knives aren’t within reach. 

“Thanatonauts,” he says, looking at his Ghost, his gun. “Don’t see how they manage that so often.” 

“Dying?” The Titan asks, some mix between incredulous and concerned. “They think it’s a win. The information is worth more than the death.” 

“Dying, maybe. _Death,_ though- ask them to lose their Light, and they won’t. Their research only extends so far. They know the most about theoretical death, at least, but who alive knows of genuine death?” He looks at the Titan, their blank faceplate, battered armor. He’s not sure who it is. He doesn’t ask.

Pahanin goes back to the Tower. That night, he wakes in the library, a golden hologram of Venus spinning slowly in the dark. Blood-red petals gather at his feet. 

He dies quietly, and does not come back until morning. 

Time passes and dying over and over feels like its own kind of cycle, its own infinite chain. “The undying minds of the Vex, and the undying bodies of the Light,” he says to his gun one day. It sounds unlike him, like Praedyth’s field notes or Osiris’ musings. He talks quietly- they are in the Crucible, after all, and the gunfire doesn’t mask all chatter. It is a place of the Light but not a place of the kind. 

“Are human minds not as strong? Resurrection heals you, you know.” 

“But what about the damage in between one death and the next? Where does all of that pain and knowledge go? A Hunter doesn’t turn back into a Spark every time they run into the wrong end of a shock blade.” 

Pahanin rounds a corner, jumping back as bullets ricochet off of the stone walls. One lands at his feet, and he thinks it's a knife, at first- thick metal, black and sharp, several inches long. 

“Traveler,” his gun says, just as a Titan comes into view.

His faceplate is flat- the same helmet as the one from before, Pahanin thinks, aiming his gun. He’s not fast enough, though, and a bullet-knife rips through his helmet. Another digs into his chestplate, though he’s already almost dead; his vision is black and sickly green around the edges. It’s _painful,_ too, like he’s surrounded by Dark and dying and there’s nothing he can do, no coming back this time. A Mare Imbrium death, a Six Fronts death. There’s no escaping the inevitable, this time, no descending into the Vault but coming back breathing.

Pahanin is laying on the ground with a thorn through his head and he still doesn’t know which is worse. 

His Ghost spins above him, and either he’s delirious or it’s glowing a pale green, too. He wants to say something, yell into the empty air so that someone hears him, knows who he is and how he dies and what he’s done. 

He can only see through one eye, now; the bullet must have went through his eye socket. When his head rolls to the side, he sees green petals lying beside him, nestled in the folds of his cloak. Rose petals, maybe, though they should be red. Garden-red, blood-red, Goblin eye-red. Everything around him is green. 

_There’s some old-Earth saying about roses,_ he wants to say. Instead, he closes his eyes, thinks unintelligibly about the Vault, the Moon, dead friends and eaten Light. 

There is no mercy kill this time. There is death, though. 

Venus spins on.

**Author's Note:**

> finally finished this up! vog isn't much better than crota's end when it comes to happy endings, i don't think. 
> 
> as always, thank you for reading! :)


End file.
